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Despite the fact that it *is* overpriced, I bought the Asus GT240 DDR5. Why? It fits in my small case while the "green" 9600GT and 9800GT don't. It has "good enough" performance for the light gamer that I am. It is a well-balanced match with my Athlon 64 X2 5400+. I'm staying with my current build and Win XP for the next 2 years, so DX10 or DX11 is not important. It's a near-silent HTPC card, my main use. I favor NVidia drivers, especially their ability to create and scale custom resolutions. Why has ATI still not included this feature in their catalyst driver? I don't want to fiddle with PowerStrip.

With a bit of fine tuning of the fan speed profile in the Asus SmartDoctor utility, I'm able to keep GPU temps below 56 deg. Celcius while gaming, with little added noise. At idle, the card temp is hovering around 33-34 deg.

I really like the low power, heat, and noise on the GT 240 a good fanless one would make a excellent HTPC/DAW candidate. A follow up review underclocking it and comparing it against a 9600GT and a bunch of integrated graphics and perhaps I5 as well. Reply

I have an aging Dell Dimension E510, for which I bought a Zotac GT240 512MB GDDR5 AMP! edition. I needed a single slot card with very little height, and I also was wary of using the 6-pin connector from my Dynex (aka Be$t Buy) 400w PSU. I really wanted a 5770, but the coolers would have interfered with Dell's CPU cooling "tunnel."

I agree the price should be dropped ten to twenty dollars, but there's been a massive improvement from the 8500GT that it replaced. This should tide me over until can afford my first home-built. The GT240 might even serve as a PhysX processor if such things don't go the way of the dinosaurs. Basically, I think this card has a definite niche; I didn't look at the 9800GT Greens, unfortunately, but I have doubts one would even fit. There is precious little space for expansion cards in my 'puter. Reply

Hi! I think the GT 240 models with GDDR5 are extremely sweet and I want to get one. I recommend it!

Look at the fine features:
* Low power / cool temps (69W)
* Quiet
* Small card (eVGA's card is even 1 slot)
* Pure Video 4th and 5th generation (VP4/5). This might be the only card that does VP5 stuff right now.
* Plays most games fine if quality/res not set too high. This is true, more or less, for all graphics cards at some point. You can never keep up with game graphics demands without spending a lot of money. If you can spend that much money, good for you, but many cannot.
* Affordable price for a card with new technology

The next Nvidia model up, the GTS 250 is a huge, hot (145W) card that is old technology dressed up with a new model name (again!). It only can do Pure Video 2nd generation (VP2) video acceleration. Sure, it can play games a little faster, but game performance isn't always the lone recommend factor for choosing your card. And, the GTS 250 does cost more when I looked at prices. If the GT 240 has enough game performance for you right now, then the GTS 250 is not a better card.

I'm not going to talk about Radeon cards because I run on Linux and stay with Nvidia cards. If you are going Nvidia, the GT 240 is in the sweet spot for overall price/performance/features IMO.

If the GT 240 is good enough for you now, the price is maybe low enough also that by the time it seems too slow for you, there will be much better cards with new technology for you to upgrade to later.

To say the card doesn't matter and just not recommend it based on mainly game performance, isn't really looking at this card's features and market from a balanced point of view. The card could be highly recommendable for a computer used for watching movies and some game playing (HTPC or others). This card is just never going to please those kinds of users that are spoiled with the highest-end components all the time - the rest of us have to compromise some and the GT 240 can fit budget and purpose well right now.

This review article, even though it does not recommend the card, might actually cause a lot of people to rush to buy these cards, for fear they will be discontinued! I was actually impressed with the game performance charts. So, this review article may very well still help sell a lot of these cards. :) Reply

I could see the GT240 as a viable upgrade for those on aging systems (Socket 939/478) and are on a tight budget. Why because the CPUs for those platforms most likely aren't fast enough to power many of the newer mainstream cards (ie: keeping the GPU well fed without being CPU limited). Also these users most likely have older monitors @ 1280x1024, and as shown the GT240 has enough oomph to run many of the new games at 1280x1024 with maximum detail and probably some AA/AF.

New build? I can see this possibly going into a HTPC, but not anything else. There's much better cards out there. The 4670 is the better card overall for HTPC and light gaming IMO. Lower price, similar power requirements, heat and noise. Reply

I might be fuzzy on remembering this but I could swear that some of the 'newer' NV cards (maybe the GT 210 and 220 which are similar to this card) can pass audio over the PCIe connection. So they still need an external sound source but not a connection. Reply

An HD 4730 can't beat anything if you can't find one for sale. I dare you to.

"For the price of the GT 240 it performs too slowly, and for the performance of the GT 240 it costs too much. We cannot under any circumstances recommend buying a GT 240, there are simply better cards out there for the price."

Its faster than an HD 4670, uses less power than a "green" edition 9800 GT, runs cool and quiet and is physically small. A great many pre-built PCs with weak power supplies would benefit not to mention its uses for HTPCs.
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Not really. ASUS is pretty big, so such a review probably won't change anything. EVGA well, we all know EVGA.

The one that pulled out is probably a small, less well known partner. If that is the case, then it's understandable that a low performing product might hurt the brand value in the eyes of (average joe sixpack). Reply

Anyone notice any lack of SLI on these cards? Of course they are soooo slow.

Okay, the ATI 4670 (DX 10.1) came out over a year ago with an MSRP of $90~100. Considering the age, its about the same wattage and noise as the GT240 and in many cases, its a slower card.

Why bother even making such a card? Other than the profit sold from a $90 GT240 is much better than a $90 9800GT.... except nobody in their right mind would bother with a GT240

If the GT240 was a $65~80 part, nobody would complain.

But what happens when ATI releases their $100 5600 series cards? Since the 5700s are pretty much on par with the 4800s. I'm not expecting the 5600s to be that exciting. Other than being $100 DX11 cards that are faster than 4670s but maybe around 4830 performance.
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Kind of sick to look at ordering forms on sites like Dell. When a basic desktop has a default price... add something like a ATI 4670 or GT240 and the price goes up $150. Apple is the WORST with their quad-SLI setup with GT120 (I think) video cards... wow, 4 slow cards at about $150 a pop! While on the same Apple order form, a single $200 ATI 4870 is available and should be faster.

the cards are in shops already, firmly in 9800gt territory, and nearly 20% more expensive than 9600gt... but at these prices it means you're just paying a $10 premium in order to have the newer card; ati's replacement of 4870/4850 with 5770/5750 meant a much bigger premium for new-but-equally-performing tech (you had bigger power savings there, though)

and, of course, I missed some comparisons with ATI cards in the conclusion, something to the tune of: "in any case, it is just sad that nvidia is unable to manufacture new chips to compete with anything ati has, other than a 4670" Reply

The reason ATI can have a big premium on the 57XX (and 58XX) is that they've got no competition. The 57XX series in particular has PLENTY of room to drop in price as it's a much simpler card to build than the 4850/70 cards that it is replacing. Nvidia has similar performance for a similar price, but it's based on older tech with higher power consumption. The prices will probably stick until Nvidia comes out with a real challenger for the 5 series (i.e. Fermi).
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Why is the GT240 only compared to nvidia cards in the entire review (except for the benchmark images)? It would be to the benefit of the reader to also know how it compares to ATi in the value for money area. What is the current price of say a 4670/4770/4850 in 512MB/1GB configurations and how would that compare in terms of value?

Also, with such a small impact, I think the evga card should have been left out of the factory-clock benchmark graphs for future lookup convenience & easy relative comparison. The performance difference compared to the normal card could have been summarized on a dedicated page. Reply

I think the over all point was that you may as well not even consider the GT240. If you wanted a generic ATI/NVIDIA comparison you would use a different nvidia card. Not to say that nvidia may not beat ATI in a comparison but a different nvidia would be a better choice for the comparison Reply

The 4800 and 4700 series have effectively been discontinued, the remaining cards are fairly rare and usually overpriced. There's little to gain comparing the GT 240 to a 4770 or 4850, as you can no longer get ahold of those cards for reasonable prices most of the time.

I can grab a 1GB 4850 off NewEgg now for a hundred and ten bucks, or a 512MB for a hundred. "Rare", sure, but "overpriced"? They're cheaper now than they've ever been, especially if you consider those are prices w/o rebates. Reply

Just FYI there is such a thing as the used video card market ;) while you can't compare pricing yourself and include it in the written details a savvy user who is looking at used cards will be able to do so. Reply

Yup, iyo (in your opinion.) However it's clear from browsing just about any hardware forum for sale section that the used video card market is quite healthy. So if iyo it's a non-starter then you would be free to ignore such comparisons, but it's impossible for others to add such comparisons except by using indirect comparisons. Reply

The GT240 DDR3 doesn't beat the HD 4670 512MB if I look at these benchmarks, seems to be about a draw. The HD 4670 is significantly cheaper however. The 1GB HD 4670 are not going to be faster, in fact they are (at settings which are playable at least hence usually not limited by the amount of ram) slightly slower because they use a bit slower ddr3 memory instead of gddr3.
The gddr5 version of the GT240 is faster than the HD 4670, I think it will be interesting to see how it'll fare against the HD 5670 (redwood based). If those early leaks are any indication, performance could be close, but I'd suspect the 5670 will draw less power, have more features (DX11, EyeFinity), and not be more expensive. Reply

I wouldn't say the 240 beats the 4670: it is faster at high quality settings, where fps are unplayable with both cards; at quality settings that mean playable fps, they are kind of even, aren't they? Reply

This card is the best bang for the buck right now. The review did not compare the card to the competition. The card supports CUDA and can accelerate a number of applications - from playing dvds to CAD and video editing. All in all this was a disappointing review probably payed by a known monopoly which competes with nVidia. Reply

I have buyed this card in the begining of 2010 the card was in the box new from a guy on ebay for 70$ and at this price it beats all the cards .If i had to buy it again i buyt at 70$ the card is small has new 40nm gpu and it overclock very easy and the power never goes above 70W in idle is only 20w.Don`t make this mistake again every card matteer for the right price :DReply